President Obama can’t quit Mitt Romney

The former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential nominee serves as a perpetual foil for the White House – and he’s one who can’t effectively fight back, has no base of support among Republicans and just happened to be the only other American politician to sign a universal health care law.

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Flashback: Romney slams ACA

Obama has name-dropped his former rival at least a half-dozen times this year on economic and health care issues. Wednesday, he upped the ante by giving a speech in Boston’s Faneuil Hall — where Romney signed his Massachusetts health care law in 2006.

But where before Obama attacked Romney as an out-of-touch tool of the moneyed elite, the White House is now using him to emphasize how conservative the GOP base has become.

There’s no more talk of Romney’s “47 percent” quip, his multiple Cadillacs or car elevators.

The 2013 Romney — according to Obama — is the archetype of a reasonable Republican. “He’s not an irrational person, he doesn’t want the government to shut down,” a White House official said of Romney. “He thinks people should have health care — those are all things we agree with.”

Both versions of Romney serve a purpose for the White House: He reminds Americans that Obama won last year’s election and highlights the split within the GOP that Romney temporarily papered over when he won the party’s nomination last year. Now, with Romney far from beloved by an angry Republican base, it’s as if Obama is taunting conservatives with his constant reminders of the 2012 campaign.

“Now, you know, Mitt Romney and I ran a long and spirited campaign against one another,” Obama said Wednesday. “But I’ve always believed that when he was governor here in Massachusetts he did the right thing on health care.”

Washington can learn from the example of Romney working with the statehouse Democrats to pass the law, Obama said.

“You know, if Republicans in Congress were as eager to help Americans get covered as some Republican governors have shown themselves to be, we’d make a lot of progress,” he said. “I’m not asking them to agree with me on everything, but if they’d work with us like Mitt Romney did, working with Democrats in Massachusetts, or like Ted Kennedy often did with Republicans in Congress, including on the prescription drug bill, we’d be a lot further along.”

Adding to the point, Obama reminded the audience that two states he lost in 2012 — Kentucky (“Keep in mind I did not win in Kentucky”) and Arkansas (“I didn’t win that state either.”), have opened state-based exchanges spurned by so many other red states.

Romney was not impressed with Obama tethering the Affordable Care Act to the Massachusetts health care law and said the president failed to understand what the state law accomplished.

“Had President Obama actually learned the lessons of Massachusetts health care, millions of Americans would not lose the insurance they were promised they could keep, millions more would not see their premiums skyrocket, and the installation of the program would not have been a frustrating embarrassment,” Romney wrote on Facebook Wednesday morning.

Occasional Romney pushback hasn’t stopped the White House from invoking his name all year.

In April, July and August, Obama made hay of Romney economic adviser Glenn Hubbard’s call months earlier for increased taxes on the wealthy to avoid sequester spending cuts. Romney never endorsed such a tactic, but that didn’t stop Obama from tying the idea to him well after the election.

“Keep in mind that this is a program that not only I put forward and supported and talked about during the State of the Union, but this was an idea that was strongly supported by Mitt Romney’s chief economic adviser,” Obama said during an August question-and-answer session on the real estate website Zillow. “So there shouldn’t be an ideological barrier to getting this done.”

When Obama was trying to get Gina McCarthy confirmed as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, it was her time serving in Romney’s gubernatorial administration that the White House highlighted. And it was Romney who the White House blamed — as late as this May — for politicizing the aftermath of the September 2012 attack on a diplomatic post Benghazi that killed four Americans.

But there is a danger of linking Obamacare too closely to Romneycare. Republicans say Romneycare simply serves as a reminder of the partisan war over the Affordable Care Act given that it passed with no GOP votes.

“By hailing bipartisan nature of the Massachusetts health care law, Obama underscores his failure to achieve any consensus at all,” Romney’s top campaign adviser Eric Fehnstrom wrote on Twitter as Obama was speaking.

“I have no idea why pointing to a successful plan should make people feel better about a different, unsuccessful plan,” Stevens said. “It’s sort of like running an empty restaurant no one likes so you invite customers to a restaurant people actually like.”